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Ambra, the PLOS Journal Publishing Platform, is Open Again

As part of our commitment to Open Science, PLOS is pleased to announce that Ambra™, the engine behind PLOS journals, is once again open source. Head over to ambraproject.org to read more and get started.

This isn’t the first time Ambra was available to those looking for a journal publishing platform. Under continuous development since 2009, Ambra was a monolithic Struts webapp offered as open source since its beginning. In 2012, PLOS began a project to re-architect Ambra as a service-oriented, multi-component stack. PLOS has been actively using, testing, and improving these new components in its journal platform since 2013, and in early 2016 we replaced the legacy Ambra webapp in its entirety. Having sorted through some minor license incompatibilities and put together documentation and quickstart guides, we’re proud to release Ambra under the MIT License.

The technology teams at PLOS are filled with talented and principled engineers, and we’re motivated by the fact that our working hours are spent promoting both Open Science and open software. If an open source software shop that hosts guest speakers like Richard Stallman sounds like somewhere you might want to work, we’re currently hiring for a number of positions.

This release is the first of many iterations we hope to complete. Future releases will round out some of the functionality you see featured on the PLOS journal sites. For example, features like commenting and search still have unbroken dependencies with other components that are not yet ready to be made open source, and dockerization of Ambra’s component applications will make it much easier to get started running your own journal on Ambra. Keep an eye on ambraproject.org for more.

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Patrick is a Product Manager at PLOS, where he focuses mostly on the publishing platform and post-publication aspects of journal publishing. He comes to PLOS by way of tech start-ups and science and technology policy. @ppolischuk